Smart Hospital Emergency System Via Mobile-Based Requesting Services

Smart hospital emergency system via mobile-based requesting services Article Published Version Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY) Open Access Al-Khafajiy, M., Kolivand, H., Baker, T., Tully, D. and Waraich, A. (2019) Smart hospital emergency system via mobile-based requesting services. Multimedia Tools and Applications, 78 (14). pp. 20087-20111. ISSN 1573-7721 doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-019-7274-4 Available at http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/88473/ It is advisable to refer to the publisher’s version if you intend to cite from the work. See Guidance on citing . Published version at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11042-019-7274-4 To link to this article DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11042-019-7274-4 Publisher: Springer All outputs in CentAUR are protected by Intellectual Property Rights law, including copyright law. Copyright and IPR is retained by the creators or other copyright holders. Terms and conditions for use of this material are defined in the End User Agreement . www.reading.ac.uk/centaur CentAUR Central Archive at the University of Reading Reading’s research outputs online Multimedia Tools and Applications https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-019-7274-4 Smart hospital emergency system Via mobile-based requesting services Mohammed Al-khafajiy1 · Hoshang Kolivand1 · Thar Baker1 · David Tully1 · Atif Waraich1 Received: 28 May 2018 / Revised: 23 November 2018 / Accepted: 24 January 2019 / © The Author(s) 2019 Abstract In recent years, the UK’s emergency call and response has shown elements of great strain as of today. The strain on emergency call systems estimated by a 9 million calls (including both landline and mobile) made in 2014 alone. Coupled with an increasing population and cuts in government funding, this has resulted in lower percentages of emergency response vehicles at hand and longer response times. In this paper, we highlight the main challenges of emergency services and overview of previous solutions. In addition, we propose a new system call Smart Hospital Emergency System (SHES). The main aim of SHES is to save lives through improving communications between patient and emergency services. Utilis- ing the latest of technologies and algorithms within SHES is aiming to increase emergency communication throughput, while reducing emergency call systems issues and making the process of emergency response more efficient. Utilising health data held within a personal smartphone, and internal tracked data (GPU, Accelerometer, Gyroscope etc.), SHES aims to process the mentioned data efficiently, and securely, through automatic communications with emergency services, ultimately reducing communication bottlenecks. Live video-streaming through real-time video communication protocols is also a focus of SHES to improve initial communications between emergency services and patients. A prototype of this system has been developed. The system has been evaluated by a preliminary usability, reliability, and communication performance study. Keywords Smart hospital · Emergency systems · e-Health · m-Health · WebRTC · Mobile health · Emergency · Emergency delay 1 Introduction Improving the efficiency of healthcare and biomedical-systems is one of the considerable goals of our modern society. Hence, it become essential to delivere a high quality healthcare Mohammed Al-khafajiy [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article. Multimedia Tools and Applications to patients while reducing the associate costs of healthcare services and, meantime, tackle the issue of nursing staff shortage [3]. In fact, in the 21st century’s Information age, we use computational facilities of every type for different purposes on a daily basis (e.g., control- ling home appliances and monitoring energy use), which led to producing and transmitting huge amounts of personal data every second. Unfortunately, despite the rapid increase in technology, finding where and when someone in an emergency is still an outstanding problem [25]. This open problem needs additional dedicated work to be resolved, due to the fact that unless an actual caller is able to tell the emergency call operator where they are, the best that can be done is to narrow down the patient’s location to a small area of a few square miles to be searched. We have looked into this problem broadly, finding methods that are being researched or in the early development giving them critical analyse of their methods. During 2014-15 over 9 million calls were received by emergency switchboards with an increase of 515,506 compared to the previous years indicating a call volume growth of 6.1% in just one year [31]. With a rising population and budget cuts it is reported that thousands of emergency calls go unanswered every year as operators try to cope with a high demand and limited resources [22, 24]. Due to UK government austerity measures which are predicted to continue to 2020 to reduce the deficit [27] it is unlikely that emergency services will receive further funding. Therefore, the motivation of using technologies to save time and money are highly in demand. In addition, its estimated that 75% of all calls received by emergency operators are considered non-emergency calls. This equated to around 5.7 million calls in 2011 [4]. Reducing the non-emergency calls volume is one area that will be focused upon. The term ‘Non-Emergency’ refers not only to cases where an event is misidentified as an emergency, but also prank calls and accidental dials. In a standard emergency call, operators will ask three main questions to callers in this order, “What service is required?”, “Where are you calling from?” and “What is your emergency?” [18]. Each of these questions pose problems for the operator if patients cannot give an accurate answer, for instance, if patients cannot provide their location or condition, the operator will not be able to send the correct personnel to correct location, thus the source of much wasted time. These three main questions will be the focus of the proposed features within the SHES system. The major issues with the call system, such as unanswered emergency calls, which directly affect human life, are extremely important and need to be addressed urgently with a viable solution. For the emergency call service to continue working, it is therefore vital that the service works as efficiently as possible, which means that it is able to handle a considerable number of emergency requests with minimal delay (within few seconds). Our system will attempt to address the various problems with the current emergency call systems along with the development of a emergency services’ mobile application call SHES. The app con- nected to the emergency and accident (E&A) units, thus, on user’s side, they will be permit to send enquiries and requesting an ambulance, on the hospital side, doctors are able to respond to a patient’s enquiry and send ambulance in case of emergency. In addition, the system will make use of new technologies such as WebRTC [14, 19], which supports web- based video communication. The feature will enhance the system usability by providing built-in two-way communication between patients and doctors, to discuss urgent cases or provide them with first aid instruction remotely. SHES is proposed for A&E units in hospi- tals, hence, a prototype of the system has been implemented upon studying the current call systems and the issues associate with them, thus, its validated by means of a simple proof of concept representative for the main functionalities and capabilities of the proposed system. The rest of the paper is organised as follows; In Section 2 the background and limitations of existing systems are discussed along with related work is analysed. The theory of the Multimedia Tools and Applications proposed SHES and its architecture are outlined in Section 3. According to the proposed SHES framework and architecture, we implement a prototype to show the feasibility of the SHES in Section 4. Results and evaluations of SHES are presented in Section 5. Finally, we summarize this paper and potential future work in Section 6. 2 Background and related research In this section, we outline the main issues related to the subject matter including an introduction to emergency systems, what are their functions, and problems are associated with them. Furthermore, we research a related work and solutions to the emergency systems along with state of the art systems and technologies in this field. 2.1 Emergency call systems After the invention of telephones in 1876 [7], it suddenly became possible to call for help from great distances by talking to an operator who would re-direct your call to the requested service/department or send help straightaway. As phone networks grew and became more complex and complicated, a need for dedicated emergency numbers became apparent. Lon- don was the first location to create a dedicated emergency phone number [8] and as of today essentially every country worldwide has at least one emergency phone number. In 2002, around 7.1 million accidental calls were made to emergency services [26]. Since the development of smart phones, this figure has dropped massively to just 284,327 in 2009. Although this decrease is a huge step forward, accidental dialling - sometimes called pocket dialling - is a common problem that must be reduced. Making it difficult to dial the number is also problematic as the number in practice needs to be easy to dial in emergencies. During the 2014-15 period, over 9 million calls were received by the emergency switchboards with an increase of 515.506 compared to the previous year, indicating a call volume growth of 6.1% [31] With a rising population and budget cuts, it is reported that thousands of emergency calls go unanswered every year as operators try to cope with high demands and limited resources [22, 24].

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